Rav Kook Torah

Mishpatim: An Eye for an Eye

Azar’s Question

During the years that Rav Kook served as chief
rabbi of Jaffa, he met and befriended many
of the Hebrew writers and intellectuals of the
time. His initial contact in that circle was
the ‘elder’ of the Hebrew writers, Alexander Ziskind
Rabinowitz, better known by the abbreviation Azar. Azar was
one of the leaders of Po'alei Tzion, an anti-religious, Marxist
party; but over the years, Azar developed strong ties with
traditional Judaism. He met with Rav Kook many times, and
they became close friends.

Azar once asked Rav Kook: How can the Sages interpret the verse “an eye
for an eye” (Ex. 21:24) as referring to
monetary compensation? Does this explanation not contradict
the peshat, the simple meaning of the verse?

The Talmud (Baba Kamma 84a) brings a number of proofs that the phrase
“eye for an eye” cannot be taken literally.
How, for example, could justice be served if
the person who poked out his neighbor’s eyes
was himself blind? Or what if one of
the parties had only one functioning eye before the
incident? Clearly, there are many cases in which such a
punishment would be neither equitable nor just.

What bothered Azar was the blatant discrepancy between the
simple reading of the verse and the Talmudic interpretation.
If “eye for an eye” in fact means
monetary compensation, why does the Torah not state
that explicitly?

The Parable

Rav Kook responded by way of a parable. The
Kabbalists, he explained, compared the Written Torah to
a father and the Oral Torah to a
mother. When parents discover their son has committed
a grave offense, how do they react?

The father immediately raises his hand to punish his
son. But the mother, full of compassion, rushes
to stop him. ‘Please, not in anger!’ she pleads, and she
convinces the father to mete out a lighter
punishment.

An onlooker might conclude that all this drama was
superfluous. In the end, the boy did not receive corporal
punishment. Why make a
big show of it?

In fact, the scene provided an important educational lesson
for the errant son. Even though he was
only lightly disciplined, the son was made to
understand that his actions deserved a much more
severe punishment.

A Fitting Punishment

This is exactly the case when one individual injures
another. The offender needs to understand the gravity
of his actions. In practice, he only pays
monetary restitution, as the Oral Law rules. But
he should not think that with money alone he can repair the damage he
inflicted. As Maimonides explained, the Torah’s intention is
not that the court should actually injure him
in the same way that he injured his
neighbor, but rather ‘that it is fitting to amputate his
limb or injure him, just as
he did to the injured party’ (Mishneh Torah,
Laws of Personal Injuries 1:3).

Maimonides more fully developed the idea that monetary restitution
alone cannot atone for physical damages in chapter 5:

“Causing bodily injury is not like causing monetary loss.
One who causes monetary loss is exonerated as
soon as he repays the damages. But if one injured his neighbor,
even though he paid all
five categories of monetary restitution — even if
he offered to God all the rams of
Nevayot [see Isaiah 60:7] — he is not
exonerated until he has asked the injured party
for forgiveness, and he agrees to forgive him.” (Personal
Injuries, 5:9)

The Revealed and the Esoteric

Afterwards, Azar commented:

“Only Rav Kook could have given such an explanation,
clarifying legal concepts in Jewish Law by way
of Kabbalistic metaphors, for I once heard him
say that the boundaries between Nigleh and Nistar,
the exoteric and the esoteric areas of Torah,
are not so rigid. For some people, Torah
with Rashi’s commentary is an esoteric study; while
for others, even a chapter in the Kabbalistic
work EitzChayim belongs to the revealed part of Torah.”